Jake Wilson

There aren't many mainstream genre films centred on women aged in their 70s, which is reason enough to pay attention to Insidious: The Last Key, the fourth instalment in the horror series which has run since 2010. Like its predecessors, it's written by Australia's Leigh Whannell, otherwise known as the mastermind behind Saw.

Lin Shaye as Dr. Elise Rainier and Caitlin Gerard as Imogen Rainier in Insidious: The Last Key.
Photo: Supplied

The woman in question is the professional medium Elise Rainier, played by Lin Shaye, a veteran character actor probably best known as one of the favourite grotesques of those burlesque specialists the Farrelly brothers (she was the spray-tanned crone tongue-kissing her dog in There's Something About Mary).

Elise was always the go-to expert for any Insidious character battling a demon infestation, but she remained a supporting player until The Last Key, a technical prequel which fills in her own origin story.

Writer/Producer Leigh Whannell also plays Specs in in Insidious: The Last Key. Photo: Supplied

That story takes us back to 1950s New Mexico, where Elise is a little girl (Ava Kolker) whose gift of second sight does her no favours with her abusive father (Josh Stewart). Things get worse still when she is blamed for a family tragedy; as a teenager (now played by Hana Hayes) she finds the courage to resist and take off for good, leaving her younger brother Christian (Pierce Pope) behind.

Cut to 2010, when Elise is a fully fledged paranormal investigator touring the country with a couple of nerdy sidekicks half her age, the jabbering Specs (Whannell), and the hulking Tucker (Whannell's old comrade Angus Sampson, who has come to look pretty menacing in his own right).

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Sounds like fun, except it's clear that the demons Elise needs to exorcise are her own, and that Specs and Tucker are stand-ins for the children she never had and, perhaps, could never allow herself to have.

More than its predecessors in the Insidious saga, The Last Key insists on a double level of meaning. On one level it's a conventional horror movie, directed by Adam Robitel in the immersive but not too confronting house style of the series. The uncanny vibe stems less from gore than from creepy noises, dark spaces and fleeting glimpses of supernatural entities, with a heavy reliance on what the industry calls "jump scares".

On a second level, this is a film about a woman coming to terms with her past and making peace with her family, specifically with Christian, played as an older man by Bruce Davison, with a lost look in his eyes that speaks of lifelong psychological damage.

The reunion between Elise and Christian occurs when she returns to New Mexico to investigate a disturbance centred in the house where she grew up. Still bearing a grudge, he wants nothing to do with her, though his daughters, Imogen (Caitlin Gerard) and Melissa Rainier (Spencer Locke), are at least curious about their newly discovered aunt.

The Last Key has many formulaic elements, and some that are downright regrettable, such as the insistence on treating the awkward lechery of Specs and Tucker as comic relief. But the film at least gives Shaye the opportunity to transform Elise, who was originally conceived as little more than a plot device, into an emotionally credible character.

By the standards of Hollywood typecasting, Shaye's long face and jutting nose suggest a wicked witch more than a heroine, and she's not ashamed to play on this, making Elise a somewhat alien figure as well as a sympathetic one. But her restrained, carefully modulated performance is the reverse of the camp theatrics associated with, say, American Horror Story.

While the Insidious series has given Shaye a rare moment in the spotlight, there's a sense in which Elise has been cursed by Hollywood's endless demand for sequels. As long as these films continue to strike a chord with audiences, the character seems destined to live out variants on the same trauma over and over.

Still, the film is the latest expression of a paradox familiar to every horror fan: belief in the demonic can be comforting, if this supplies an explanation for less fathomable evils closer to home.